Bloggasm

For months, word has circled in the journalism business that Bloomberg was on a talent hunt for its new opinion product, and it meant business — up to almost $500,000 worth of business, if the New York Times is to be believed.

Now, a month before it is set to launch, Bloomberg View is finally showing its hand.

The list of columnists stretches from established forces on the Washington media scene like Jonathan Alter, who recently left Newsweek after nearly three decades to write weekly columns for Bloomberg, to newer voices like Ezra Klein, who will contribute to Bloomberg on top of his responsibilities as a columnist and blogger at The Washington Post.

Bloomberg View reveals columnists, editorial board

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A few years after Nick Denton stopped shelling out bonuses based on Gawker Media pageview tallies, USA Today has decided that such a strategy is a grand idea. The Big Lead reports that the paper “outlined a plan in which it will pay annual bonuses to writers based on page views.” It used to be that Gawker allowed anyone to view the individual monthly traffic stats broken down by author, so media nerds could follow along at home (I’m too lazy to check if they still do this), and a New Yorker profile of Denton revealed that he keeps a large television leader board displaying the most-viewed articles across Gawker Media sites. But Denton later closed down the pageview bonus system, voicing what many who have access to traffic stats have come to learn: focusing on raw page views often brings in crap traffic, which isn’t easily monetizable. Denton said he’d begin focusing more on growing Gawker’s core readership, which could be measured by return readers, RSS subscribers, and other indicators of longtime loyalty.

The Washington Post seems to have realized this with the launch of its new traffic dashboard. At first glance it seems that they are falling victim to the same pageview-chasing mentality, but as Ken Doctor outlines in a Nieman Lab piece, the traffic analysis they’ll be sending out hourly to 120 employees will focus on multiple layers of engagement:

For instance, the Post now knows that less than 10 percent of its audience accounts for more than a third of its traffic, paralleling similar trends I’ve picked up at The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. It knows that Facebook referrals increased 238 percent in 2010 over 2009, while Twitter referrals jumped 123 percent. Following the trail, it has discerned that Twitter is best at multiplying traffic on big breaking stories, while Facebook referrals — so far converting to almost double the pageviews of Twitter referrals — will relay the trend stories better. Such knowledge can help in deciding which stories to feed most heavily to which social networks.

The Post is starting to get a handle on its core customers, as the news business increasingly groks — witness much paywall strategy — that those core readers are the building blocks of the new business, while Google-fed fly-by traffic is paling in value. Now tracked: percentages of visitors who read two-plus pages (34 percent on a recent day) and those whose sessions lasted five minutes or more (19.6 percent on that same day).

There are always grumbles from older reporters when a newsroom adopts these tactics, but as a journalist I’ve always been fascinated with this data. It’s often frustrating when I submit an article somewhere and my only metrics for its success are based on retweets and Facebook likes.

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I have an article in The Atlantic today about the web developers who create apps and news hacks to further enrich the Washington Post’s news reporting:

With dozens of stories appearing in the Washington Post every day and only so many web developers, there’s only so many ideas the team can deploy. Deciding which ideas are acted upon comes down to what Drinkard described as “level of effort versus perceived value and impact.” His job is to balance long term projects that center around a news event they know is coming — a major debate or election, for instance — with these short one-offs. “It’s sort of split three ways,” he explained. “There’s the big stuff initiatives that you know you’re going to spend the next six months working on. There’s the little stuff that you spend one or two months on, or even a matter of weeks, and there’s the little stuff that comes up every day so you can help unstick something.”

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I can’t help from still finding humor from Andy Baio’s “The Daily: Indexed.” For those who haven’t seen it, Baio noticed that The Daily — the Murdoch-owned iPad app — had online versions of its stories but no index or table of contents; so he created a hack to index the newspaper. Why was there no table of contents? The Daily wants to be able to eat its cake, in that it wants its walled garden but doesn’t want to lose out on the viral functionality offered by social media tools. The Daily wants its paid users to peruse its articles and then tweet them out within the app, but only within the app. If people were able to easily peruse the table of contents, The Daily’s staff feared, then people wouldn’t pay for the app. The Daily is essentially trying to maintain what has quickly been labeled a “leaky wall” (The New York Times has launched its own leaky wall recently).

Of course by opening leaks in the wall, the hackers find ways to nudge their way in. Baio was one such hacker, Joshua Benton from Harvard’s Nieman Lab was another. The Daily has tried to keep a tight lid on how many people are actually paying for and using the app, but because of the Twitter API, Benton was able to team up with Postrank to measure how many people are actually tweeting within the app, and used the long-term trends to map the downward trajectory of app use.

Meanwhile, Matthew Ingram got his hands on a newly-released social media policy document from the Toronto Star. In it, he found these quotes:

Anything published on social media – whether on Star sites or personal platforms – cannot reveal information about content in development, newsroom issues or Star sources … As well, journalists should refrain from debating issues within the Star’s online comments forum to avoid any suggestion that they may be biased in their reporting.

“The Star is not the only media outlet making these kinds of errors,” Ingram concludes. “While they are happy to use social media to push their content, most major newspapers have failed to take advantage of these tools when it comes to building relationships with their readers.”

I mention all these incidents together — The Daily: Indexed, the Daily Twitter API, the Toronto Star’s social media policy — because they represent a kind of stepping stone in the newspaper world. We keep hearing newspaper executives admit that their companies were “slow to adapt” to the new media environment, but this has always been said in past tense, as if they were slow to adapt but now that they’ve recognized this flaw they’ve turned the ship around. But often we see incidents like the example above, where the newspapers approach these social media tools with the idea that they can somehow fit them into their already-existing media strategy. They aim to keep all the seeds firmly planted in their own garden.

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Today I read an interesting article in the Financial Times about a paper that found blocking your employees from internet sites like Facebook can actually be counter-productive. I went to my bitly account to tweet a link to the article, and copy and pasted a single line from the piece as my teaser for the link. When I did this, here’s the text that appeared in my bitly box:

Can you imagine anything more obnoxious? The Financial Times has essentially embedded an html legal threat into all of its text, so that the thousands of bloggers, twitter users, and Facebook users who want to share its content have to go through the process of deleting all this extraneous text before they can send the paper readers. It’s like that annoying “Read More” html embed you’ll see but 10 times worse.

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Tim Carmody has a great piece at Nieman Lab looking back at the rosy outlook many newspaper publishers had with the launch of Kindle several years ago. While Kindle’s market has seen nothing but massive growth, there hasn’t been much success with selling subscriptions to e-editons to newspapers.

One possibility for this, Carmody argues, is that the Kindle still doesn’t allow the media rich environment of other tablets, meaning there’s little leeway for delivering creative advertising. However, there’s been wide speculation that Kindle could launch an Android-based tablet, and there’s little doubt in my mind that this would be the best tablet competitor to the iPad.

One of the major hurdles that other tablet makers have is pricing. Because of its app store and other economies of sale, Apple is able to sell its iPad at a much lower price than its competitors. Amazon, however, has its already massively successful Kindle store and also a newly-launched app store. With millions of credit cards in its database offering one-click purchases, Amazon can afford to sharply discount a tablet or enhanced Kindle device as a loss leader. By launching an actual tablet rather than an e-reader, Amazon will be able to cross clearly into iPad’s turf rather than existing in some kind of middle ground, and may even have more of a strategic advantage because of its moves into video streaming subscriptions. An Amazon tablet would not only enhance the retail giant’s competition with Apple, but with Netflix as well.

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At first glance, the Washington Post’s Q4 report suggests that newspapers may be able to rein in the revenue decline they’ve been experiencing for the last few years. Revenue remained stable from year to year and 43% of the paper’s revenue came from online. But Frédéric Filloux easily read between the lines:

Now the bad news: this trend is more a reflection of the print’s business continued erosion than of a sufficient growth on the online side… Over the last seven years, for each dollar added to online revenue, the WaPo lost five dollars on print. During that time, the Post has lost $88m of print ad revenue and it improved its online business by only $18m. This leads us to a key realization, a sobering one: there is no hope current online revenue stream will someday offset the past decade’s tremendous losses.

Despite such pessimistic forecasts, Filloux had some suggestions for how WashPo could stem the tide:

- Cutting down at their inventory by at least 50% in order to revive a sense of market scarcity.
- Investing much more in technology in order to match the sophistication of clever pure players.
- Refusing to sell the lower end of their inventories to bottom-feeding “ad networks” that act as powerful deflationary engines.
- Getting out of the audience-measurement systems that are ridiculously inaccurate and setting up their own system of traffic analysis.

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